In today's fast-paced world, accurately monitoring the existence, location, and movement of objects in inventory is becoming increasingly important to businesses and other organizations. Although sophisticated systems exist to track objects (e.g., active and passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags or other wireless devices, barcode scanners, PDAs, etc.), there are limitations with the current approaches.
One problem involves maintaining the ready availability of supplies that are critical to the proper functioning of an organization. This is particularly true for the growing number of companies whose businesses depend on their equipment being absolutely free from the interruption of service (e.g., failure of networking, computer, or communications equipment, etc.) that the lack of a replacement part may cause. To limit storage space and expense, businesses often keep inventory levels at a minimum. Suppliers and technicians store spare parts at forward stocking locations, remote depots, and public storage facilities in an attempt to keep inventory close to customers to reduce response times. However, failure by personnel to scan or to properly track and monitor inventory such as communications equipment and computer parts when they are moved from storage areas often results in erroneous information in the inventory system. Thus, supplies may not be tracked in real-time or replenished when necessary. Moreover, many methods do not provide visibility, let alone real-time visibility, into the actual inventory in a given location nor sufficiently control or secure access to valuable inventory. Existing approaches may provide some secure means of access such a locked door or cabinet using physical keys and/or a method for tracking and viewing inventory; however, none couple both of these methods such that a reliable system could know what and when a particular inventory item was removed by a particular person.
It would be helpful if a system existed to more efficiently track and monitor objects in inventory and to quickly and reliably decrement or increment items in stock while concurrently associating the movement of inventory with a particular person based on data automatically provided to the system rather than relying on a person to re-trace their steps and manually enter inventory changes via paperwork or independent computer interface.